Brisbane Festival Closes This Week

 If you haven’t yet been to see the sights and sounds of The Brisbane Festival, now in its third year, then get off your couch and see what Brisbane has to offer, because it closes this week!

 If you haven’t yet been to see the sights and sounds of The Brisbane Festival, now in its third year, then get off your couch and see what Brisbane has to offer, because it closes this week! With over 70 productions, 400 performers, 4 world premieres and 5 Australian premieres over three weeks, the festival has something for everyone.
Opening with the Sunsuper River fireworks and ending with an equally spectacular free event, Opera Queensland and Queensland Symphony Orchestra join to perform Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata on September 24 at Eagle Farm Racecourse.
Like a time capsule, the Brisbane Festival artistic director Noel Staunton said that each annual festival captures the essence of the city and its people of the time.
Commissioned especially for the festival is Composer Elena Kats-Chernin’s The Symphonia Eluvium (Symphony of the Floods): a symbolic acknowledgement of the devastating Queensland floods in January 2011, and will have its world premiere performance at QPAC by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.
Also commissioned for the festival is the collaborative work Beautiful Noise by Brisbane’s Raw Dance Company and Sydney’s Legs On The Wall.
Another wonderful collaboration is the Work in Progress performance of 2012: Apocolypse, which brings together Brisbane-based physical theatre company Zen Zen Zo and the world’s oldest Japanese Butoh company, Dairakudakan. The work is based on the Mayan prophecy of a 2012 apocolypse.
Other international contributors include the National Theatre of China with the contemporary avant-garde play Rhinoceros in Love.
The Metro Arts will house the experimental artist collective works called Under The Radar, culminating in 100 performaces, while QUT Festival Theatre will house the classic Bell Shakespeare production of Romeo and Juliet.
And of course, what is a festival without the infamous Spiegeltent experience, with shows nightly in King George Square. 
For more information visit the Brisbane Festival website.
Mortal Engine: Photo by Andrew Curtis